I saw a play recently about the painter Egon Schiele; in it, attractive women queued up to be his muse. That's just another way in which fine art differs from comedy. Yes, standups have groupies – but their expectations are different. If your artist lover paints you, it's seen as a compliment, an act of devotion, a postcard to eternity. If your standup spouse jokes about you, it's an occupational hazard at best, and at worst, grounds for legal action.

This is what Annelise Holland appears to have felt, at any rate. It has just emerged that the estranged wife of standup Stephen Grantlost her legal bid to prevent her ex from joking about her on stage. In April 2009, Holland's lawyers demanded from Grant an undertaking not to disclose information in his comedy act relating to his divorce from Holland, because it may "cause her professional embarrassment". Grant's lawyers duly invoked the Human Rights Act and the right to free speech in the comic's defence – and won the argument.

Does Holland have any claim on our sympathy? OK, so it's frustrating when you can't control what your ex says about you; the more so when he has a public forum to do so. But, assuming Grant stays on the right side of slander (which he is now, presumably, vigilant to do), Holland hasn't a leg to stand on. I know one or two comedians' spouses, and they accept their occasional appearances in standup routines as a sometimes amusing, sometimes tedious fact of married life. Had she had access to legal redress, would Les Dawson's mother-in-law have cut off the source of his signature jokes? (In 2009, the mother-in-law of US comic Sunda Croonquist did indeed sue for defamation. The case was thrown out of court.)

And what of John Cleese, who launched his How to Finance Your Divorce tour last year solely to fund his acrimonious £12m split from Alyce Faye Eichelberger? Take away the jokes about his ex (he called her "the love child of Bernie Madoff and Heather Mills"), and there'd be no show left.

What Holland should know is that no one mistakes a standup's opinions for facts, and nor are they meant as such. Whatever Stephen Grant says about his ex, audiences will assume it's invented or exaggerated for comic effect. That's what comics do. When Les Dawson told us that his mother-in-law had fallen down a wishing well ("I was amazed. I never knew they worked"), no one called the emergency services. When Grant quips that "when I got the house back, the only thing [his ex-wife] left was a broomstick. Which was odd, because I thought she might have needed it for transport," it's the writer of the ropey joke, and not its subject, who emerges with least credit. Ironically, perhaps, Holland's effort to gag Grant – which is the only thing any of us really know about her – casts her in a worse light than any of his jokes.